ESOS Phase 2

You may not be aware but ESOS phase 2 arrives this year. Reporting under ESOS was first required in December 2015 but with a qualification date for businesses set at 31 December 2014. The scheme requires medium sized business, with turnover of €50m (currently £44.15m) and over, or those with at least 250 employees, to report its annual energy consumption. The scheme is overseen by the Environment Agency and compliance with ESOS is required every four years. Businesses that did not fall within the realms of the scheme four years ago, may now fit the criteria and will be required to report for the first time. Business energy use is generally broken down into three categories; buildings, transport and process.

Businesses that have already reported the first time round, will find ESOS phase 2 much easier, as the systems to record and report on data should be in place and they will have more of an idea about the scheme. Hopefully, some of them will have looked into the findings of the energy reporting first time round and may well have introduced energy saving measures already.

There will of course be businesses that reported under ESOS four years ago, that now have changed, in terms of turnover or staff, and now no longer fit the criteria, in which case they will not need to do anything this time round. In four years time again, they should reassess the business to see if anything has changed again.

ESOS data collection

Advice would always be to be prepared early and start collecting data now and as a minimum, consider what systems need to be in place to make that data collecting easier. Talking to an ESOS Lead Assessor would be a good idea; one is needed at the sign off stage anyway, whether it is an in house assessor or external assessor.

The Qualification date for ESOS phase 2 is 31 December 2018. On that date, any businesses meeting the criteria set out in paragraph one above (and in more detail in the official ESOS guidance) are required to report under the scheme. The Compliance Date is then 5 December 2019. This is the date when ESOS reports must be submitted. That is still some time off but gathering a year’s worth of energy data including mileage or fuel receipts and meter readings, across multiple energy uses and suppliers, can be a slow process.

The energy data must cover 12 months and can be any continuous period between the 6 December 2015 (the day after the first ESOS phase Compliance Date) up until 5 December 2019, the ESOS phase 2 compliance date.

These qualification and compliance dates are some way off and during the first phase, there was an extension to the deadline and some companies were given until the summer of 2016, some six months after the official deadline, to submit their reports. Whether this time around the Environment Agency will be so lenient, only time will tell.

ESOS phase 2 non-compliance

After the first phase, the government investigated 2,400 organisations. 240 of those were then found to be meeting the requirements of ESOS and required to submit reports under an enforcement notice. A further 190 enforcement notices were issued and are on-going.
Don’t get caught out and start considering ESOS phase 2 now!